Samsung did not immediately comment. Its Smart Hub is a smart TV platform that lets users search and access content including apps.

Sony in Japan said it could comment only after checking with colleagues in the U.S.

It is not clear how many countries were affected by the outages, though users from the U.K., Argentina and the Netherlands were reporting issues, suggesting that the problem was not limited to the U.S.

Sony Pictures Entertainment was hacked last year and its online service PlayStation Network faced a distributed denial of service attack on Christmas Day, but on Tuesday there appeared to be no claims by any group that the Sony Entertainment Network, a hub for third-party streaming services to TVs and other devices, had been hacked.

[Tim Hornyak in Tokyo contributed to this report]

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